[OS X TeX] Bibliography Key

[Herbert Schulz]

On Sep 21, 2009, at 4:02 PM, Alan Litchfield wrote:

> Herb,
>
> It has taken a while to get in front of my LaTeX Companion and it  
> does not
> appear to say in there that the cite key can have no spaces although  
> all the
> examples have none. Having tried it on a sample file PDFLaTeX failed  
> to read
> an entry in which I added spaces into the key and succeeded in  
> reading it when
> I removed the spaces. So the non-use of white space appears to be  
> implied.
>
> However, when I entered the key and put a white space before the key  
> in the
> tex file it was ignored. If I put a space before the key in the bib  
> file, that
> too was ignored.
>
> Cheers
> Alan

Howdy,

I agree, it isn't clear from the documentation. I've looked in the  
BibTeX documentation, The LaTeX Companion (2nd Edition), Guide to  
LaTeX (4th Edition), LaTeX - A Document Preparation System and More  
Math Into LaTeX (4ht Edition) and all were unclear about the spaces.  
Of course the proof is in the pudding and if bibtex chokes the answer  
is clear.

I'd guess leading spaces might be ignored so I'd leave them out!

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)